Barker, Margaret What did "Son of God,"
"Messiah," and "Lord," mean to the first Christians when they used
these words to describe their beliefs about Jesus? In this book
Margaret Barker explores the possibility that, in the expectations and
traditions of first-century Palestine, these titles belonged together,
and that the first Christians fit Jesus' identity into an existing
pattern of belief. She claims that pre-Christian Judaism was not
monotheistic and that the roots of Christian Trinitarian theology lie
in a pre-Christian Palestinian belief about angels-a belief derived
from the ancient religion of Israel, in which there was a High God and
several Sons of God. Yahweh was a son of God, manifested on earth in
human form as an angel or in the Davidic King. Jesus was a
manifestation of Yahweh, and was acknowledged as Son of God, Messiah,
and Lord. Barker relies on canonical and deutero-canonical works and
literature from Qumran and rabbinic sources to present her thoughtful
investigation.

Margaret Barker. The Great Angel: A Study of
Israel's Second God.
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992.

This is what we mean by
"paradigm shift." In reading Margaret Barker's wide-ranging
investigation one feels the tectonic plates shifting and coming
together in a new configuration, or perhaps rather a very old one, as
we see the outlines of primal Gondwanaland restored again. Barker
strips off the blinders of the canonical redactors of the Old
Testament, a job we thought we'd long ago completed. Just as
fundamentalists continue in obedience to the faith of the Priestly
Writer and the Chronicler and their retrojection of Second Temple
Judaism into the Patriarchal and Mosaic periods, the rest of us have
too easily been gulled into accepting the Mishnaic urgings that
Post-Exilic Judaism was monotheistic.

Until
the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we were content with the
assumption that in Jesus' day Javneh Judaism already existed as a
dominant mainstream. We were willing to take at face value the dictum
of Josephus and the rabbis that prophecy had long since ceased in
Israel, somehow not discerning that such an argument means precisely
to clamp the lid on contemporary, inconvenient prophecies. Similarly,
we have been too willing to let pass unexamined the assumption that
Judaism was safely monotheistic ever since the Exile. Barker's case is
that monotheism was a Deuteronomic novelty imposed with incomplete
success onto Israelite faith just before the Exile, and that the
suppressed traditions continued in full bloom, though not without the
marks of impact, alongside monotheistic orthodoxy right on through the
New Testament period, furnishing the categories, ready-made, for New
Testament Christology. In the meantime, the old traditions had taken
the forms of Apocalyptic, incipient Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism,
and Philonic Logos speculation. We have blithely assumed that these
various thinkers, schools and groups hatched hugely complex
mythologies ex nihilo overnight, like mushrooms after a rain shower.
But Barker asks the obvious question of whether it is not a priori
more likely that they were all variously working with very old
traditions and variants of traditions, that their efforts lay mainly
in fine-tuning and providing new slants to old mythemes and doctrines,
those of ancient Israel outside Deuteronomic orthodoxy.

Barker's starting point
is an untied loose end, Deuteronomy 32:8-9, which seems, on any
straightforward reading, to make Yahweh one of the seventy sons of
Elyon, i.e., not the high God, but rather the godling entrusted with
Israel as his province, pretty much equivalent to the one like a son
of man in Daniel 10:10-21 (whom Barker in fact makes the same
character). Yahweh/the Angel of Yahweh (apparently synonymous even
within the same texts) was the second God, later encountered under the
various appellations of Metatron, the Memra, the Logos, even the
archangels Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, etc.

The pattern is much the
same as in Canaanite religion, the cognate twin of Israelite religion:
El is the elder high God, while Baal is his son, the virile young
warrior who succeeds his father as divine king. In Daniel 7 we see not
so much a fragment bor- rowed from El-Baal tradition, but rather a
home-grown Jewish version of the same mytheme, picturing Elyon and
Yahweh. And just as Baal had his divine consort, Anath, so did Yahweh:
the goddess variously known in the Old Testament as Asherah, Ashtoreth,
the Queen of Heaven, Eve, and Wisdom. In all this, Barker draws
together much fascinating data discussed in earlier studies including
Raphael Patai's The Hebrew Goddess and Alan Segal's Two Powers in
Heaven.

Barker discerns the
narrowing of Israelite polytheism into monotheism in passages like
Deut 6:4, the Shema, "Hear O Israel, Yahweh your God is one Yahweh"
(obviously a corrective to a belief in many Yahwehs or gods) and
Second Isaiah 43:11, which protests against apparent competitors
within Judaism that Yahweh is the one and only savior. In other words,
Yahweh and Elyon have been consolidated. Such a consolidation had been
thought to stem from a much earlier period. Barker asks whether many
Pentateuchal traditions which presuppose the divine conflation must
not be redated into a later Sitz-im-Leben.

This elimination of
other deities, this fusing of Yahweh with Elyon, seemed to those who
did not accept it a blasphemous usurpation by an arrogant lesser deity
(or his priestly patrons, which came to the same thing), and the
rejection of this Deutero- nomic Yahweh-exaltation survived into
Merkabah mysticism as the punishment of Metatron the Little Yahweh
when mystics confused him with the ultimate deity. It survived into
Gnosticism as the rebuke of Saklas, the demiurge who vainly imagined
himself the highest deity. It may even be reflected in the myth of the
fall of Satan who aspired to be like Elyon and ascend to the mount of
the divine assembly.

The ejection from the
pantheon of Wisdom, the Queen of Heaven (Barker argues for the
identity of the two), was already bemoaned by her devotees in Jer
44:15-19. Is it this sympathy which survived into Apocalyptic Wisdom
traditions as the myth of the descent and reascent of rejected Wisdom,
unable to find a dwelling among recalcitrant men? Was this also the
origin of the Gnostic myth of the Fall of Wisdom, poised between an
Unknown Father (the old Elyon "unknown" to monotheistic orthodoxy) and
an arrogant demiurge who created the world and lied to his creations?

Barker's suggestions are
consistently striking, illuminating both the biblical text and the
history of traditions adjacent to the Bible, such as Gnosticism and
Philonism. Tucked away in the vast compass of the volume is her new
theory of the origins of Gnosticism, that it was a mutation not of
early Christianity or even of disillusioned Jewish Apocalyptic, but of
pre-Deuteronomic Israelite polytheism. One might view her suggestion
as a twin to or an extension of Paul Hanson's theory of the origin of
Apocalyptic as a popular reaction against Second Temple hierocratic
Judaism, repristinating ancient mythemes for new purposes.

In thus providing a
surprising Israelite (not just Jewish) pedigree for Gnosticism, Barker
means to make superfluous the theories of Reitzenstein and others
which trace Gnosticism back to Hellenistic and Iranian sources.
Similarly, she seeks to stultify the widespread position that New
Testament Christology and, later, the doctrine of the Trinity were
derived from Hellenistic speculation or the Mystery Religions. Her
conclusion is that when early Christian theologians quoted the Old
Testament theophanies as Christophanies, they were not merely proof-texting
the Old Testament in the service of an alien Christ-concept, but that
they meant to say that in their belief the exalted Jesus had become
identified with Yahweh the Son of Elyon, that he was the lesser and
second God who had been manifest as such in the Old Testament
theophanies.

Fair enough, and an
interesting and plausible reading of the evidence which should
occasion much debate. But one wonders if Barker is still drawing too
bold a line between Judaism and Hel- lenism, a line that Martin Hengel
has managed largely to erase. Specifically, one wonders if we have an
either-or or a both-and situation when it comes to theories (such as
those discussed by Jonathan Z. Smith in his Drudgery Divine) which
interpret the death and resurrection of Jesus in the categories of the
Hellenistic religions of Attis, Osiris, Adonis, etc. Judaism, too, was
part of Oriental Hellenism. These other religions grew from
Near-Eastern roots. When we prefer to understand Jesus as an analogue
to Yahweh/Baal, what is the difference? Baal is already the same,
pretty much, as Adonis/Adonai, isn't he?

And here one wonders if
Barker might not be willing to take her thesis a step farther and
explain the origin of the myth of Jesus' resurrection as one more
piece of polytheistic Yahweh tradition. If Yahweh was in so many ways
parallel to Baal the Son of Elyon, why should this not have extended
to the death and resur- rection concept? It was by a resurrection
victory that Baal became king of the immortals. Why not with Yahweh?
Perhaps this aspect of the earlier Yahweh cycle had been successfully
expunged by the priestly editors. But, a la Barker, we may surmise
that it, too, hung on in the popular and sectarian imaginations,
emerging into the light of history again when the mytheme was claimed
for Jesus-Yahweh.

One last speculation
suggested by Barker's opus. (Surely one of the marks of a seminal work
is that it immediately suggests more trajectories for research than it
can possibly follow up.) Barker makes the archangels aspects of Yahweh
and thus instantiations of the second God. She notes at one point that
various Gnostics pictured one of the archangels with the face of a
donkey (Origen, Conta Celsum VI. 30; Apocryphon of John 2.1.11). If
both the Old Testament Yahweh and the exalted Jesus were supposed to
be more or less equivalent to one or more archangels, one wonders
whether we do not have here the best hint we are ever likely to get as
to the origin of the pagan belief that Jews worshiped the head of an
ass in their temple, and of the pagan graffito showing the crucified
Christ with an ass's head. Could these representations actually
reflect some type of vanished Jewish and Christian sectarian
iconography? There is much to think about.

One of the most striking
extra-biblical accounts in the Book of Abraham is the story of
Abraham's harrowing escape from the idolotrous priests who were about
to sacrifice him.

"And as they lifted up
their hands upon me, that they might offer me up and take away my
life, behold, I lifted up my voice unto the Lord my God and the Lord
hearkened and heard, and he filled me with the vision of the Almighty,
and the angel of his presence stood by me, and immediately unloosed my
bands; And his voice was unto me: Abraham, Abraham, behold, my name is
Jehovah, and I have heard thee, and have come down to deliver thee,
and to take thee away from thy father's house, and from all thy
kinsfolk, into a strange land which thou knowest not of...." (Abraham
1:15-16)

Certainly the passage
seems innocuous enough at first glance, but upon reflection certain
phrases in this passage become troubling. The angel figure who came to
save Abraham is identified as the "angel of [God's] presence", a
rather unusual phrase, but on the other hand the angel identifies
himself as Jehovah! Was the "angel of the presence" merely a
messenger, speaking as if he were Jehovah, or was this actually the
manifestation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The answer is
given away when Jehovah says, "I have heard thee, and have come down
to deliver thee...." And so we can be certain that Jehovah himself was
the "angel of God's presence".

Now, within LDS
theology, this designation is certainly not a commonplace, but on the
other hand it would be an acceptable one for Jehovah (or Yahweh), who
was the preincarnate Jesus Christ. Thus, Jehovah is the Word, the
messenger (or "angel") of salvation, the Son of God who is one in
Godhead with His Father (Elohim or El Elyon = "God Most High"), but in
another sense a "second God", the greatest of the sons of God. In
other words, for Latter-day Saints it would not be a contradiction to
designate Jehovah as both an "angel" and "God".

No doubt this is blatant
heresy for both modern Judaism and mainstream Christianity, which make
no distinction between Elohim and Yahweh, but recently many
(non-Mormon) scholars have begun to recognize that not only were the
Most High God and Yahweh conceived of as distinct beings in the oldest
stratum of Israelite and early Christian thought, but Yahweh (and
later Jesus) were given the designation "Angel of the Presence". In
this essay we will examine some of the evidence for this
interpretation.

Yahweh and the Angel of
Yahweh

Was Yahweh God, or an
angel, or both? Margaret Barker has recently given a great deal of
evidence that He was originally considered both God and the chief
angel in her book, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God.
According to Barker, Yahweh was originally believed to be the greatest
of the sons of God Most High. However, after the Exile a faction arose
who, in reaction to the pagan pantheons, began to equate Elohim and
Yahweh - and hence some of the later passages in the Bible make no
distinction between the two. (It is perfectly acceptable for
Latter-day Saints to believe that the Bible text has been thus
corrupted, but for us there are other possibilities, as well. God may
well have directed his prophets to emphasize the oneness of the
Godhead in order to discourage belief in a pantheon of gods at odds
with each other. See Alma 29:8; D&C 19:4-12; 3 Ne. 26:8-11; 2 Ne.
31:21.) This faction eventually became the majority in Israel, but the
minority who still believed the older doctrine was never completely
stamped out, and eventually this movement provided the basis for the
Christian revelation. In order to show that Yahweh was originally
thought of as both God and an angel, Barker demonstrates that an
ancient Old Testament figure known as "the Angel of Yahweh" was
actually equated with Yahweh himself.

"Was this angel an agent
of Yahweh, or was the angel the manifestation of Yahweh? The text is
usually read as though the former were the case, but there is
considerable evidence to suggest that the angel was Yahweh. It is this
angel which is the key to recovering beliefs about Elyon [the Most
High] and Yahweh and to the ultimate origin of Christian belief about
Jesus." (1)

Barker goes on to
present quite a bit of evidence for this thesis, among which is the
following:

"Gideon saw the Angel of Yahweh, and
this storyteller too identified Yahweh and the Angel of Yahweh. The
Angel of Yahweh appeared to Gideon (Judg. 6:11-12), and introduced
himself as Yahweh (Judg. 6.12). It is then as Yahweh that he speaks to
Gideon (Judg. 6.14,16). The Angel of Yahweh disappears, and Gideon
realizes whom he has seen. He fears because he has seen the Angel of
Yahweh face to face (Judg. 6.22) but
Yahweh reassures him that he will not die (cf. Exod. 33.20, where
Yahweh said 'You cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and
live')." (2)

In
later texts the "Angel of Yahweh" disappeared from view as Yahweh and
Elohim were fused, and many of Yahweh's functions were taken over by
the archangels in popular thought.

"The Angel of Yahweh has
no obvious heir in later texts. Although the so-called inter-testamental
writings are full of angels, they are new angels with names.... After
the reforms of the exilic period when Yahweh was fused with El-Elyon
["God Most High"], he certainly did become a more distant God, but
angels were not 'invented' to fill the gap. The angels were those
heavenly beings who had formerly been the sons of Elyon, the kin of
Yahweh the Holy One. When Yahweh became Elyon, his roles were filled
by other angels. Ideas about the angels were refined and elaborated
over the centuries but in their essentials they remained the same."
(3)

The "Angel(s) of the
Presence"

Therefore, Yahweh was
originally seen as both God and angel, but what of this strange title,
"Angel of the Presence"? Barker intimates that this was once one of
Yahweh's titles as well, which was later given to the archangels.(4)
Segal explains that whoever was designated as the chief angel in the
Isrealite literature was also given the title "Angel of the Presence":

"Of course, Gabriel and
Michael are often seen as but two of the several archangels. Yet,
whenever a configuration of archangels appears, one or another (often
Michael or Gabriel, sometimes Uriel) is designated as the principal
angel (often called "Angel of the Presence") or regarded as superior
to the others." (5)

Barker explains further:

"In the Qumran Hymns
there are the Angels of the Face (1QHVI) among whom the men of the
covenant hope to stand, with no need of a mediator or a messenger to
make reply; an interesting comment on the role of these angels. One
version of the Testament of Levi says that Levi, when he was
travelling through the heavens, saw the Angels of the Presence 'who
minister and make propitiation to t he Lord for all the sins of
ignorance of the righteous' (Test. Levi 3.5)." (6)

Accordingly, Luke and
the apocryphal book of Tobit refer to angels who stand in the presence
of God. "And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that
stand in the presence of God...." (Luke 1:19, KJV) "I am Raphael, one
of the seven angels who stand in attendance on the Lord and enter his
glorious presence." (Tobit 12:15, NEB) However, Isaiah is the only
Biblical writer to use the phrase "angel of his presence". Speaking of
the goodness of Yahweh toward the house of Israel, the Hebrew text of
Isaiah 63:8-9 (followed by the KJV) reads: "For he [Yahweh] said,
Surely they are my people, children that will not lie: so he was their
Saviour. In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of
his presence saved them...." It is clear from the text that Yahweh
saved his people by the "angel of his presence", but it is not at all
evident that Yahweh was equated with this angel, although this is most
certainly the case. The ancient translators of the Greek Old Testament
(Septuagint or LXX, translated in the second and third centuries B.C.)
knew of this tradition, and therefore made no reference to the "angel
of his presence", but translated the verse in question as, "It was no
envoy, no angel, but he himself that delivered them." (Isaiah 63:9,
NEB) Clearly, Yahweh was the "angel of his presence".

Jesus as Yahweh and the
"Angel of the Presence"

As Barker indicated, the
belief in Yahweh as Israel's second God, the chief angel, was the
basis of early Christian Christology. Many verses could be cited to
show that Jesus Christ was equated with Yahweh, but for our purposes
we need only reference Jesus' statement, "Before Abraham was, I am."
(John 8:58, KJV) The Greek for "I am" is here identical to the
Septuagint translation of Exodus 3:14 where Yahweh says "I AM THAT I
AM." Clearly Jesus is identifying himself with Yahweh.

And yet, in keeping with
the most ancient Israelite tradition, Jesus was also believed to have
been the chief of the angels. For example, Paul called Jesus "the
image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature...."
(Colossians 1:15, KJV) In the second century Justin Martyr called
Jesus both angel and God:

"And that this power
which the prophetic word calls God, as has been also amply
demonstrated, and Angel, is not numbered [as different] in name only
like the light of the sun but is indeed something numerically
distinct, I have discussed briefly in what has gone before; when I
asserted that this power was begotten from the Father...." (7)

In the third century
Novatian also felt it necessary to explain how Jesus could be both
angel and God:

"... because He is of
God, is rightly called God, because He is the Son of God. But, because
He is subjected to the Father, and the Announcer of the Father's will,
He is declared to be the Angel of Great Counsel. Therefore, although
this passage neither is suited to the person of the Father, lest He
should be called an angel, nor to the person of an angel, lest he
should be called God; yet it is suited to the person of Christ that He
should be both God because He is the Son of God, and should be an
angel because He is the Announcer of the Father's mind." (8)

Even as late as the
early fourth century both Methodius and Eusebius could make the same
claim:

"And this was Christ, a
man filled with the pure and perfect Godhead, and God received into
man. For it was most suitable that the oldest of the AEons and the
first of the Archangels, when about to hold communion with men, should
dwell in the oldest and the first of men, even Adam. And thus, when
renovating those things which were from the beginning, and forming
them again of the Virgin by the Spirit, He frames the same just as at
the beginning." (9)

"Remember how Moses
calls the Being, Who appeared to the patriarchs and often delivered to
them the oracles written down in Scripture, sometimes God and Lord and
sometimes the Angel of the Lord. He clearly implies that this was not
the Omnipotent God but a secondary Being, rightly called the God and
Lord of holy men, but the Angel of the Most High his Father." (10)

And even more
interesting is Jean Danielou's claim that in certain early Jewish
Christian traditions both Jesus and the Holy Spirit were believed to
be the two "Angels of the Presence":

"But there was also
another scheme, according to which the Son and Spirit were considered
as the two Angels of the Presence transcending all others - as, for
example, in the Ascenscion of Isaiah. In this text and II Enoch they
appear as an adaptation of the figures of Michael and Gabriel, and it
frequently happens that these two archangels are separated from the
rest and treated on a common higher level." (11)

Conclusion

We have established that
Abraham's identification of Yahweh with "the angel of his presence"
was consistent with the earliest Israelite traditions, and also with
the earliest Christian traditions. But if we assume, as the critics of
the Book of Abraham do, that Joseph Smith created this remarkable
document by applying his fertile imagination to the sources he had at
hand, how did he come up with this strange designation for Yahweh? The
only Biblical source for the phrase would have been Isaiah 63:9, but
we have seen that this verse gives no hint that Yahweh was equated
with "the angel of his presence". This conclusion can only be drawn
when the Greek text is compared with the Hebrew. However, the
Septuagint was not translated into English until 1851, so again we are
at a loss to find a source for the Prophet. Consider also that we have
not been able to find even a single case where Joseph Smith used this
title to refer to Yahweh, aside from this solitary passage in the Book
of Abraham. Therefore, we are forced to conclude that Joseph Smith was
inconceivably lucky in his choice of words, or in fact the Patriarch
Abraham chose these words to describe his God.

I corresponded with
Prof. Margaret Barker sharing with her my opinion about the Golden
Calf representing not anything Egyptian but a symbol for Yahweh as the
Son of EL who's totem animal was the Bull. Calf to Bull, Son to
Father. Those Israelites still worshiping the Israelite tribal god
Yahweh as a Son of EL were to be "corrected" (i.e. terrorism) by Moses
and the rabid monotheists promoting Yahweh to EL Elyon's position as
the Most High.